The invention relates generally to broadband and wireless communications and more particularly to multicast video and data delivery with beamforming antennas in indoor wireless networks.
Wireless multicast is an efficient technique for delivering shared media and data such as mobile TV, sports telecast, video conferences, location-based services, software update and network management. Due to the shared nature of wireless medium, one multicast transmission can potentially reach all desired clients, thereby saving precious wireless resources. Nevertheless, wireless multicast also has limitations. One major limitation is the tradeoff between the transmission rate and the coverage. If an access point (AP) intends to transmit at a high transmission rate, only a small subset of users can receive the data. On the other hand, if an AP intends to cover all clients, it has to choose a rate, (a.k.a., modulation and coding scheme (MCS)), based on the client with the worst channel condition, thereby limiting its multicast throughput for all other users dramatically.
Prior works have considered exploiting switched beamforming to enhance wireless multicast transmission. However, these prior works studied the problem of minimizing the multicast transmission delay for a fixed size of data traffic. The problem that must be consider is one of scheduling switched beams to cover a group of clients with the objective of maximizing the total utility of all multicast clients subject to a total delay constraint, where the utility is a general measure of video quality or user-satisfaction. We consider the networks model assuming overlapping beam patterns and two video models: multi-resolution model and SVC (scalable video coding) model (also called multi-layered model). The key issue of this problem is the selection and scheduling of beams, MCS (modulation and coding scheme), and video resolution/layers.
Accordingly, there is a need for enhanced video delivery with beamforming antennas in indoor wireless networks that considers selection and scheduling of beams, MCS (modulation and coding scheme), and video resolution/layers.